Modern vehicles are increasingly complex and therefore require highly capable command and control systems. In the face of operational anomalies, brought on by equipment or operational failures, these vehicles require additional capabilities to identify and mitigate against the effects of failures. Vehicle Health Management (VHM) systems complement the command and control systems by helping to address failures and anomalies so that the command and control systems can operate effectively in nominal (healthy) conditions. The VHM system manages the health of the vehicle system, identifying failure states and helping mitigate the effects of these failures so that the vehicle may be returned to its nominal state. In this discussion we are focused primarily with the first aspect of health management, diagnosis, the detection of failures and isolation of the root cause of the failure
One issue with vehicle health management systems is difficulty in updating functionality of the system. Previous VHM systems have been integrated together in ways that inhibit the ability to modify or update the system. For example, the systems are typically constructed such that it is difficult to add to new sources of data for testing and analysis. Typically, in order to add new functionality of new sources of data, the operation of the entire VHM system must be reevaluated. This makes upgrades to functionality problematic and limits the flexibility of the VHM system. Traditional VHM designs also suffer from their lack of “portability” across platforms, such as ground flight or lab/vehicle platform transitions. Often these systems must be redesigned in order to accomplish this type of transition.
Thus, what is needed is an improved system and for monitoring the health of vehicle systems that provides for improved flexibility and performance.